Slashdot Mirror
Top University Rankings for 2004 Released
jemecki writes "US News and World Report has posted their annual rankings for the top colleges and universities in America. Of particular interest to Slashdotters are the top Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering universities and the top overall engineering schools. For those that don't want to RTFA, Harvard and Princeton are the best in the country, and MIT, Stanford and Berkeley are the best in Engineering."
I am applying to college this fall, looking for a degree in computer engineering (or software, maybe. heh) so I can go join the rest of the madding crowd in the unemployment lines.
The portions of this report available free didn't really surprise me -- MIT and Berkeley were already on my "apply here!" list, and maybe Stanford just for fun. But I have a bunch of others in mind -- Carnegie-Mellon, Harvard, CWRU, maybe Ohio State (tuition would be cheap or free as I live in state).
This story should generate some more interesting suggestions as to what I should look into--particuarly because we have to pay money to see more than the top 3--and I'm very interested in input from the techie crowd, particularly those who have already gone through the college circus.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Forget this survey. Is there really a surprise when schools that cost $30,000 per year rank at the top? What I'm interested in is a country -vs- country ranking. Here in Canada we have some amazing universities, and I'd love to see them up against the US's best.
"The market alone cannot provide sufficient constraints on corporation's penchant to cause harm." -- Joel Bakan
The Debt Rankings are interesting though. I also thought that cal tech's #1 on the Best value ranking was interesting. Totally subjective, but interesting.
"I can not bring myself to believe that if knowledge presents danger, the solution is ignorance" - Isaac Asimov
I know there's gotta be some other JHU alumni reading this. For years, Johns Hopkins has been ranked around #15, which always prompted Hopkins to brush the rankings aside as subjective. Surely the rankings are bullshit, they would say, since anyone worth their salt knew that JHU was the premiere research institution in the world.
:)
So my freshman year, 1999, rolls along and Hopkins finds itself ranked #7 by US News. Oh how they did celebrate. We heard about it nonstop for the first few weeks of school, especially during orientation. Major prestige thing. Huge boost to the administration's collective ego. And those rankings? Not so subjective anymore, were they? Finally those US News guys saw the light, and ranked Hopkins near the top!
Man, what a bunch of hypocrites. Long live JHU
Intercarve Networks, LLC
a popularity contest than anything useful
How can you all afford to go to university?!?
In the UK, tuition is ~ 1k/year, wherever you go.
$30 / year ?!?!?!?!?!
C'mon up to Canada for your education. The tuition is about half (or less) of what it is in the states, if you're gay you can get married, and we're about to decriminalize marijuana.
Better yet, you don't have to pay to see our rankings:
1 Toronto
2 Queen's
*3 McGill
*3 Western
5 UBC
6 Montreal
7 Alberta
8 Sherbrooke
9 Ottawa
10 McMaster
11 Dalhousie
12 Saskatchewan
13 Laval
14 Calgary
15 Manitoba
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
Either you pay for it in high tuition or you pay for it in high taxes. ;-)
If you can't afford $30K/year (and that is for the most prestigious of schools, most schools are much less than that), there are scholarships, grants, and loan programs to pay part or all of your tuition.
By reading this sig, you agree to the terms of my sig license.
Loans.
Lots of loans.
I went to a relatively inexpensive school, and I still have a ton of debt from it. I'm glad I didn't go anywhere more expensive. I'm quite happy with the education I received at Clarion, too.
--RJ
My wife used to work at a University in the Statistics/Retention/etc... or soemthing like that dept. I used to call it the Department of Imaginary Numbers. For example, when she turned the graduation report in to the Dean/board about graduation rates the #1 degree was nursing. Well, they didn't want to be known as a nursing school so they told her to break the nursing graduates down into specialties. She then asked if she should do that for the engineering/math/chemistry departments as well. The told her no, only nursing.
So much for accurate statistics! She left that job after few more reports had to be modified. For fun we called back to admissions to our old school to get the graduation rates. Scary that the same thing was going on there.
It would be interesting to see the colleges lumped together to see where the school focuses for REAL.
"If you are on fire you can just stop, drop, and roll. If you fall into Lava you are just dead." - my 5yr old daughter
Spot on!
Another point is that the majority of community college faculty are actually interested in teaching students. Most university faculty, particularly those at the "prestigious" institutions, have absolutely no interest in teaching. They want to do research. Odds are that the undergrad classes at those top universities are being taught by graduate assistants anyway.
I've worked as an institutional research administrator for a couple of community colleges, and I've found that when community college students transfer to universities, they perform as well as or better than students who started as freshmen at the universities.
On the tuition side of things, attending a community college translates into savings sufficient to pay for the junior year at a public university.
The end result is that unless you're one of those rare /.ers that could actually get admitted to Harvard, Stanford, Princeton or MIT, you're going to attend a state university, and most state universities already have "articulation agreements" with their local community colleges to expedite transfer of credit, etc.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
Avoid schools primarily geared towards engineering. Well, if you want to learn how to interact with real people anyway.
There are a few good reasons to go to a big state school, esp. if you have one that's decent at your intended major in your state.
1) It's cheaper. You will be very hard pressed to make enough money after school to make up for the extra $100,000 in debt you'll be from MIT or Stanford.
2) You will run into many, many more people during the rest of your life who went to your school. This is good.
3) Real people will not instantly label you as a snob.
4) You have a much broader range of educational opportunity, and employers value this. Employers want engineers who took a few humanities classes. You will enjoy the opportunity to take a few humanities classes. You will have the opportunity to apply your major to fields that are just not available at engineering oriented school.
5) If you decide you hate engineering - and I know many people who do - you can easily move into something else.
6) Social Fraternities. I'm not saying you should join one, but you should have a good friend who does.
7) Women. Who bathe. Some who have probably not heard about the tech bubble bursting and who will date you because of your perceived post-graduation paycheck.
8) You'll still have access to everything you would have had at an engineering-only school.
I know way too many people who went to Engineering schools who have a very difficult time functioning outside of an Engineering environment. One of the *MOST IMPORTANT* things I got out of college was taking classes with, and doing extra-curricular activies with, people who were smart *AND* not engineers.
paintball
This may surprise you, but the median household income for the US in 2001 was $42,228, and most families have more than one child. The 80th percentile begins at $83,500.
I feel compelled to respond to your post, mainly because you mentioned my alma mater (Princeton) in a disparaging way.
On the topic of financial aid, what you say was largely true at one time. However, the situation has gotten A LOT better. The financial aid rules have been reformed over the past 10 or so years so the inequities that you mention have been reduced.
When I was going through college (class of 93), the financial aid formula assumed that something like 80% of assets in a student's name would be used towards tuition, while only something like 20% of assets in the parent's name would be used (I don't remember the exact figured, but you get the idea). If the family had saved money in the names of somebody else, like a sibling or a grandparent, those assets wouldn't be used in the financial aid calculation AT ALL. This ended up penalizing students like myself whose parents had saved money in my name. On the plus side, after the first year when all the assets in my name had been exhausted, my financial aid got A LOT better. Anyway, this rule has been reformed so that assets in the student's name aren't penalized as much.
There have been other reforms to the financial aid system. For instance, home equity isn't included as heavily in your parent's assets. Your friend whose parent's house appreciated in value wouldn't have hurt them as much today. Also, I know that Princeton recently announced that they would eliminate loans from their financial aid packages and replace them with grants.
All these things taken together show me that college administrators are listening to people's complaints about aid.
One area in which Princeton falls short is in their switch from Early Action to Early Decision. Under Early Decision, if you apply early and are offered admission, you are obligated to go. This does hurt students because if you are concerned about financial aid, you are discouraged from applying early because you don't know what your bill is going to look like. It's sort of like agreeing to buy a car without knowing what the sticker price is. If a car dealer did it, Ralph Nader would be all over this issue. However, since Nader is Princeton Alum, I guess he thinks it's okay!
Also, you mention how Princeton is not very diverse. If anything the elite school bend over backwards to show how diverse they are, even if they have to lower their standards. Of course, that is a debate for another day....
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www.moneybythenumbers.com
Real socio-economic advancement is happening, by . . . nonetheless succeeding in fields that reward true hard work, skill, intelligence, and risk taking behavior (e.g., business . . .
The business world rewards intelligence and risk-taking behavior? My Introduction to Management textbook said, "the people who get promoted often are not the best workers, but the best politicians." In my experience, it's quite often the people who exhibit "intelligence and risk taking behaviors" are the ones who are labeled "management issues" or "not a team player" or "not a Company man" and are let go. Why? They represent a threat. No, there is tremendous pressure to get along by going along at the expense of these very attributes. All too often, this meets with disastarous results.
Well Princeton is one of the worst in that respect. Part of my problem is that they go about seeking diversity in the wrong way. They all too often seek out students that they can describe as African American whose experiences are often either that of an upper middle class person OR lower class (and ilprepared to compete in serious programs), but then effectively reject the many many more students, such as those of recent immigrants (many of whom have real stories to tell), between lack of consideration and lack of financial aid, even though they are very very capable of competing with those students. All too often they admit people that just can't cut it in a serious fields of study.
I've heard and I think it's a real mistake. Either the parents OR the students should at least pay something. Moderate student loans and work study programs are not overly onerous and they can go a long way to keep people honest, to make sure they really want to go there, etc. It shouldn't be viewed as an entitlement.